Queries

Sonig; 2006

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In the second half of the 1990s, Jan St. Werner of Mouse on Mars was active making solo tracks as Lithops. He released two albums and a number of singles under the name during this period, all with little promotion and to little notice. These records served as a bridge between Mouse on Mars' pop experiments and the randomized abstraction St. Werner created with Markus Popp of Oval in Microstoria. When Mouse on Mars leaned ambient, as on the Instrumentals and Glam records, it sounded a lot like what St. Werner was doing around the same time with Lithops.

The notion of computer folk was still a couple years away during the Lithops heyday, but returning to the singles and unreleased material collected here, the idea fits the music rather well. It's not that Lithops incorporates guitars or references "folk" proper in any way; it's that the music seems to bubble up from a similar organic place. It feels simultaneously earthy and disembodied, like it always existed in some form and it was St. Werner's charge to channel and shape it.

Which is not to say that the music is divorced from genre. Many of St. Werner's usual concerns are present. When the tempo shifts upward and percussion makes an appearance, tracks like "Tubino See-Through", "Wackler", and "Blasphere" make oblong reference to dub, keeping just behind the lilting beat as St. Werner moves weird bubbly noises around the space. The more open-ended excursions in mood and ambient extend naturally from Eno circa On Land, with St. Werner adding a distinctive industrial dirtiness to the sound. A fantastic title used for a Lithops track collected on Mille Plateaux's Modulation and Transformation 4 (and not included here) sums up the aesthetic of "Kahn", "Sequenced Twinset", and "Fi" rather nicely: "Between The Jolts Were Gritty Regions". You can almost smell the solder and feel the greasy metallic residue on these droney pieces. And then the noisy slo-mo dissection of feedback "Blasmusik" points to the spoonful-weighs-a-ton density St. Werner would later explore on Scrypt, a record I'm still trying to get my head around three years after its release.

The world of technology was going crazy as the 20th century ended and no one really knew what was to come. It has accelerated further since, of course, but by now we're getting used to it. When Moore's Law was in full effect and a new paradigm was announced every couple of weeks, we had no idea where these silicon chips were going to take us. In this environment, Lithops singles seemed like the sort of pleasant, unassuming, natural, and open tracks that would emerge from computers in this new era. They sounded like machines making music independently and for their own amusement.